Disclaimer: Dianetics and Scientology are trademarks of the Religious Technology Center (RTC.) These pages and their author are not connected with the Church of Scientology or RTC, or any other organization residing under their corporate umbrella.

Scientology library: “Cynthia Kisser”

Tips: A blank year in one or both fields will result in an open-ended search. Keywords are matched against tags, titles, authors, publishers, types. Use uppercase 'OR' to search for items that match either expressions on each side of the 'OR' keyword.

Here's a little source material for you all regarding my piece on the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project. In it, I mention a particularly strongly worded letter sent by Queens City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. to Rev. John Carmichael, president of the New York branch of the Church of Scientology. The letter was sent to Carmichael in response to Vallone's strong words about Scientology, which can be found here and here. Carmichael requested a meeting with Vallone, but that ain't ...

Tom Cruise says Katie Holmes is now a fully-fledged follower of L Ron Hubbard. So what is it about the sci-fi writer's 'religion' that exerts such a hold? Sara Lawrence goes undercover to find out Sitting on a red velvet chair in the middle of a majestic, oak-panelled hall in East Grinstead, I have rarely felt more fearful for my sanity. On the wall in front of me, a creepy, larger-than-life-sized portrait of an old man seems to be staring straight ...

In 1989, Fielding McGehee and I published The Need for a Second Look at Jonestown, a collection of essays written by those who had been involved with Peoples Temple. In this retrospective volume, people reflected on their experiences of the previous decade, as well as on their understanding of the Temple. Contributors included former members, relatives, and others who had had connections with the Temple, such as news reporters and social activists. Shortly after the book appeared, Chris Hatcher, the psychologist ...

Greg Bashaw's father respected him and trusted him to make wise choices. Even after he chose to devote his life to Scientology. While the shock and grief of his son's suicide were still fresh, Bob Bashaw read back through their decades-long correspondence, looking in particular for references to Scientology. "I wanted to see what there was here I missed," he says. His son Greg had been a member of the Church of Scientology for more than 20 years. During that time ...

Keith Henson, American activist on the run in Canada, thinks the controversial Church of Scientology has made him fair game for dirty tricks Looking back, maybe the joke about the "Tom Cruise Missile" wasn't such a good idea. That online jest, made last year by Keith Henson, a peaceful if persistent critic of the controversial Church of Scientology, has led to his being found guilty of "intimidating a religion," and now on the run from the U.S., hiding out in plain ...

Transcript: Descriptions of video in italics. VO=Voiceover of Lesley Stahl. LESLEY STAHL (in studio): There was a time if you were worried about your son or daughter being in a cult, you could get help from a small, non-profit organization called the Cult Awareness Network, or CAN, for 20 years the nation’s best-known resource for information and advice about groups it considered dangerous. Among them was Scientology, a church not known for turning the other cheek. But church officials say Scientology ...

When the end finally came for the old Cult Awareness Network, it happened fast. Cynthia Kisser, CAN's executive director, struggled to stay calm as she sat in federal bankruptcy court in Chicago late last October waiting for the auction to begin. Kisser, who had spent the past nine years leading CAN's efforts to inform the public about dangerous cults, had hoped that she wouldn't have to pay much for her group's assets that day. Nor did she want much, she claims ...

From Correspondent Dan Knapp
SAN FRANCISCO (CNN) – At one time, the Cult Awareness Network took as many as 16,000 telephone calls a year in an effort to help anxious families worried about sons or daughters involved with unconventional religions.
But last month, after 20 years of operation, the Cult Awareness Network closed its doors, forced into bankruptcy after losing a costly lawsuit to the church of Scientology.
Now the phones are ringing again – but this time there's a good ...

BARRINGTON, Ill. - Hostile takeovers are nothing new in the corporate world, but what happened to the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) is an exceptional tale of the hostile takeover of a nonprofit organization. The anti-cult advocacy group is being dismembered and absorbed by its adversaries, who attorneys say have deftly outmaneuvered CAN in the courts. CAN's fate highlights the crippled state of what was once a prominent movement that for years kept America's unorthodox religious groups on the defensive. The modern ...

BARRINGTON, Ill. - For 20 years, the Cult Awareness Network ran the nation's best-known hotline for parents who grew distraught when unconventional religious groups they neither trusted nor understood suddenly won the allegiance of their children. From its offices in a Chicago suburb, the network (known as CAN) answered more than 350 telephone inquiries a week, counseled relatives at conferences attended by thousands and gave news interviews to everyone from small-town daily newspapers to "Nightline." As CAN's influence rose, so did ...

Lawsuits: Group with controversial ties to deprogrammers files for bankruptcy and may be forced to shut down in wake of $1-million judgment. Plagued by numerous lawsuits from religious groups and fighting a $1.1-million judgment against it, the Cult Awareness Network has filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 7 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. "How we will operate or if we will continue to operate in the short term, I don't know," said Cynthia Kisser, executive director of the 12-year-old organization, known for ...

I am a musician, mainly a bassist, in the local area. My lovely mug has graced the pages of your paper on occasion, featured, you may recall, with my band of a few years back called Brouhaha or, more recently, with Earthwurm. I am also an ordained priest of the Order of Vedantan Monists. If you consult rudimentary reference materials, you will find that Vedanta has been the voice of religious freedom for about the last seven to ten thousand years. ...

HCISD board member distributes material with Scientologist links in classrooms A coalition of Harlingen minister has taken a stance against an essay contest for schoolchildren based on a book written by Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. The Harlingen Ministerial Alliance, which is made up of representatives from about 12 churches in Harlingen, said it is opposed to the distribution of The Way to Happiness booklets as part of the essay contest. "If this group is permitted in classrooms, then ...

Walter Plywaski placed the blue yarmulke on his head. A Jew by ethnicity but an atheist by choice, he rarely wore the symbol of faith. But it seemed important now, as he stood near a mass burial site for Jews murdered at what had once been the Riederloh "punishment" camp in Germany. Somewhere beneath the stone markers, he believed, were the remains of the father he'd seen beaten to death for cursing an SS commandant in January 1945. Fifty years later, ...

BETTY NORMAN was no match for the telephone con men who emptied her pockets of more than $40,000. A plain-talking widow who runs a small motel in Ionia, Mich., a town of state prisons and apple orchards, Mrs. Norman, born and raised here, was taught to believe that people are essentially honest. So she trusted salespeople who picked up details about her life in seemingly casual telephone chat while pitching her pens, costume jewelry and other trinkets. And after being swindled ...

Rick Ross, self-confessed "cult deprogrammer" and ATF advisor in the Waco holocaust has been charged, in the United States, with the 1991 abduction of a Christian teenage boy. Ross and his accomplices, Mark Workman and Charles Simpson, were charged in July with unlawful imprisonment in the abduction of Jason Scott. If convicted they face a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison. The charges against the three were the most recent in a string of legal actions brought against deprogrammers by ...

Now [Nancy] Cartwright is appearing on television in another role: a 30-minute television program that the Church of Scientology hopes will expose more people to [L. Ron] Hubbard's message and increase the number of people seeking Scientology counseling. Now, next to those telephone-order woks and real-estate courses comes Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the 1950 self-help classic from Hubbard, whose writings and research are the gospel of Scientology. The group has its spiritual headquarters in Clearwater. Scientology is never ...

THE drama of David Koresh that has been played on the front pages of newspapers and on the televisions in living rooms across America has stirred many troublesome questions about cults. Groups such as Koresh's Branch Davidians are certainly not a new phenomenon. And the real story is not that this violence has occurred, but that there are many other groups in society that could turn to such dangerous behavior. It is true, however, that there are some groups that are ...

Religion: Judge says Cult Awareness Network must let church members attend L.A. convention. But conference organizers fear longtime foes will disrupt activities. Members of the Church of Scientology won a court victory over a longtime foe Friday, clearing the way for a group of Scientologists to attend the Cult Awareness Network's national convention in Los Angeles next week. The ruling in Los Angeles County Superior Court is the latest development in an escalating feud between the two organizations. The battle erupted ...

BOSTON — Scientologists, long a target of deprogrammers, have gone to court to try to turn the tables, claiming that they were illegally barred from joining an anti-cult group. In a flurry of lawsuits filed around the nation, dozens of members of the Church of Scientology said they tried to join the Cult Awareness Network but were rejected because of their church affiliation. Many of the lawsuits were filed last week after a federal grand jury indicted three alleged members of ...

Seven self-professed "parishioners" of the Church of Scientology have filed religious discrimination lawsuits against the Cult Awareness Network and five members of the group, including a Glendale resident, in Glendale Superior Court. In the lawsuits, filed Friday and Monday, the plaintiffs allege that they have been denied access to the Cult Awareness Network's national convention, to be held in November, on grounds of their religious beliefs. The seven lawsuits — practically identical except for the plaintiffs' names — claim that the ...

In May 2008, Ron Sharp's hard work consisting of over 1260 FrontCite tagged articles were integrated with this library. There are more contributors to this library. This library currently contains over 6000 articles, and more added everyday from historical archives.